Today I was set up to do the tour of Avila and Segovia. The weather was threatened to be cold and rainy and I decided I should be prepared for it even if there were significant bus times on the tour. I therefore opted to bring an umbrella with me and I guess I am glad I did.
I started out first trying the buffet breakfast at the hotel which wasn't bad but isn't worth 9Eu. So I won't be doing that again even for the coffee which was from a machine but not bad. After breakfast I had to make my way to the tour office which is literally a 5 minute walk down the street. I think it is closer from this hotel to the tour office than the walk in Prague. This tour office is a bit more hidden but the girl at the desk of the hotel gave me great directions so I had no issues getting there. It rained pretty much until the tour actually started at 9:15 but when we got outside there was actually sun. This lasted for maybe about 25 minutes of the drive as we headed up into the mountains and then pretty much it was rain or overcast the rest of the day. The landscape around here is all shades of grey, brown and yellow on the rocky ground. There is a dark clay for soil it looks like and there are more rocks than back home perhaps. I would hate to have to dig around here. The shovel blade would be blunt in minutes. The yellows came from the dried tall grass that is everywhere. They have a lot of conifers around here and some deciduous trees which did sprinkle in the green that was still overwhelmed by all the darker colors. I am curious how much different it looks out here in the summer. I hope it is more green. If not for all the rain I would say the countryside looks arid.
The first stop on the tour was the city of Avila, which is one of the oldest cities in Spain. If I understood the guide Andres correctly the city was formed somewhere around 2400 years ago. I am not sure if I heard him right though. In any event it has a well preserved city wall from the 11th century that I suspect must have been reconstructed a couple times. It was beautiful but in too good shape to be completely the original. The guide said there were 88 towers along the wall. Avila was the birthplace of St. Teresa who formed the Carmelite monastic order. So we visited several churches that had a theme involving her existence. The church of St Vincent was where she was baptized I believe. We did not go in the cathedral but only walked the perimeter and heard a little bit about it. I guess it wasn't too stunning inside or it must have been too expensive to include in the tour. The last church we visited was the Convent of St. Teresa. It was built on the land where her familial house was. Apparently there is a chapel in there that represents the location of her mother's room in the house and therefore is the place where she was born. There was a lot of history about St. Teresa in this part of the tour. I'll be honest with you. I didn't know who she was before the tour.
After Avila we headed on to the bus and drove to Segovia. Segovia really is an old city as well. It has a Roman aqueduct that dates back 2000 years or so easily. That was supposed to be the first stop the guide brought us to but I guess we were behind schedule and the included restaurant was just down the hill from it so he brought us to the restaurant and dropped us off. It was called El Cordero I believe. I had the Gastonomic lunch which included a bottle of wine for the table, white bean soup (the beans were huge and it had smoked pork in it), roast suckling pig (they gave me a huge hunk), salad and bread. The pig was very tasty but the skin on it was very thick and hard and I didn't try to eat it. The dessert was a "Segovian cake" which tasted like it had rum in it and vanilla ice cream. That was followed with a coffee. Around lunch time I met Mary who is from Michigan, though originally she is from Hungary so far as I could gather. She was very nice and owned a spa in the richest town in Michigan, Bloomfield I think. She had been to Spain before and told me a couple things to do. So we chatted away lunch until we were done then I headed up the hill to see the aqueduct before heading on to the cathedral. Since the guide had dropped us off we were on our own to make it where we needed to be. I took a few pictures and climbed up along the aqueduct then headed toward the cathedral. I was among the first to get there even though I took the long way around. He told us to go into the cathedral and wait for a few minutes at the main altar while others came in. Even then he started his speech with less than half of the tour there. I spent the time wandering and taking pictures of the place while I waited. It is a strange place in the sense that the outside is Gothic but the inside is a mess of Baroque and Romantic styles that really make it unusual to any other cathedral I've seen. I can't say it was all that impressive as it was dark and not very decorative. The high ceiling of course is a feat but after seeing so many cathedrals it becomes sort of banal. From what I understand it was built externally then stopped for nearly 250 years when the construction resumed. I would guess financial issues. In any event it was interesting but kind of ugly. From the cathedral we walked down to the fortress of Alcazar which has an Arabic name but the place wasn't really Arabian at all. It was a full on medieval style castle that overall had been kept in good condition but for a fire that happened in 1819 (might have been 1890) which damaged some of the wood work in ceilings. That was rebuilt according to the original plans according to Andres though so what we saw was basically what it looked like before the fire. It was fairly cool looking and I only wish the weather was more cooperative for pictures of the outside. In any event I liked it a lot. It had a nice series of views over the lower part of Segovia.
After the Alcazar we headed back downhill to the bus and then on the road back to Madrid. I think we got in about 6:15 which wasn't too bad. I was expecting and possibly hoping for a tad bit later knowing that dinner would be later for my standard and it meant killing time. At least it was not raining when we got off the bus at the tourist office. I basically headed back to the room and freshened up and wrote this in the time I had then headed down to buy a tour to Toledo for Friday. No not Ohio... After doing that I walked around for a few minutes and it was still terribly early for dinner in Spain, at least in Spanish places, so I opted to try Pizza Marzano which turned out to be a reasonably good Italian place. I had a couple Mahou Classicas, garlic bread and penne quattro formaggi. The food was tasty though the garlic bread could have used a touch more garlic to the flavor. That was basically enough for me to head in to the hotel and watch a Korean movie I had in my collection. It was strange but funny, called The Good, The Bad, the Weird. Ask me about it some day.
The pictures from day 5 are here.
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